Copyright « realitybasedcommunity

I am an attorney and consultant living and working in Manhattan, focusing primarily on church/state constitutional law. I'm a recognized expert on the Church of Scientology organization. I also have strong interests in intellectual property law where it intersects with emerging media, and free speech.

I support the efforts of the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the National Lawyers Guild, the ACLU, Creative Commons, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I am a member of the New York County Lawyers Association and the New York State Bar Association. I also enjoy (watching) hockey and (doing) photograhy.

Online I can be found on Facebook, Twitter. My resume can be viewed here. I can be reached by phone at 212.645.6241 or by e-mail at pilutik[at]gmail.com.

Hillsong misuses copyright law to create distance between itself and religious fraudster Guglielmucci

The following contains every element necessary for a good story: religious fraud, pornography, and copyright abuse. As Wikipedia puts it, “Michael Guglielmucci is a former pastor and songwriter with some of Australia’s biggest youth churches…,” specifically Hillsong Church, which is affiliated with Assemblies of God Pentacostal denomination, and for which Guglielmucci wrote and recorded numerous [...]

Google terminates NYC Scientology critic site’s AdSense account

Google terminated EpicAnon.com‘s AdSense account yesterday, informing the site by e-mail: While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we’ve decided to disable your account.

Please [...]

rinf.com site pulled by zen.co.uk – b/c of me?

About a week ago, I was surprised when someone pasted to me a link to an article I’d written (on eBay and e-meters), which was now hosted by the website RINF.com — the actual url to the story is here, although it won’t work at the present. I was immediately annoyed because the article had [...]

Yet Another E-meter, This Time for Real

The two e-meters in the previous post were indeed sold on eBay. However, the sale of the first e-meter ended after one day–five days early. The sale of the second e-meter is curious too, as no picture was included in the listing. This may have had the effect of robbing Scientology of its only thin [...]

New E-Meters For Sale on eBay

And with a very low $50 starting bid! It’s an older model, a Mark VI, and from the looks of it as well as the description, used. Here’s the link to the e-meter. Here’s a screenshot of the listing, in case it suffers the same fate as countless e-meters before it. With so much attention [...]

traffic!

I never expected all this hoopla (and you can quote me on that!). The hoopla I’m speaking of is for the 45,000+ ‘unique visitors’ to this site yesterday, from Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, Guy Fawkes, and Emma, all to read my post on Scientology’s abuse of eBay’s VeRO system. You all caused me to lose sleep [...]

Scientology Abuses eBay's VeRO Program to Practice Religious, Price Discrimination

By the time Bill (not his real name) left the Church of Scientology a few years ago, he had amassed quite a collection of Scientology material—mostly books, tapes, e-meters. But ex-members of Scientology (especially staff members) find themselves in a difficult spot in this regard when they leave Scientology: their books, tapes, and e-meters are [...]

Possible Scientology v. Gawker Empire copyright action

I attempted to leave the below comment at this thread on Gawker but it hasn’t yet appeared, so I’ll just post it here as well. The post includes a cease and desist letter from Ava Paquette and a reply by Gawker’s lawyer and VP, Gaby Darbyshire, claiming fair use. — A few points regarding fair [...]

Scott Pilutik